Help with Virtual Battery Aggregator Freezing Values When Solar is Connected

Q&A and troubleshooting
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Hello everyone,

I’m working on a virtual battery aggregator for my Victron Cerbo GX setup and running into some unusual issues that I hope someone here might help me understand better.

:hammer_and_wrench: What I’m Building:

  • I have multiple batteries connected via serial to the Cerbo GX.
  • Each battery has its own D-Bus service (e.g., /com.victronenergy.battery/ttyUSB0_*).
  • I’m aggregating their values (Voltage, Current, SoC, etc.) based on their configuration (e.g., 4 in series, 4 in parallel).
  • These aggregated values are pushed to a custom virtual battery D-Bus service, which I then set as the Battery Monitor in Settings > System setup > Battery monitor.

:police_car_light: The Issue:

When I select the virtual battery as the battery monitor and connect a solar charger, the virtual battery page in the GUI:

  • Freezes for a long time
  • Then updates all values rapidly
  • Then freezes again, and repeats this cycle

This only seems to happen when:

  1. The solar charger is connected, and
  2. My virtual battery is selected as the system’s battery monitor

:magnifying_glass_tilted_left: My Setup:

  • I’m using dbusmonitor to read all serial battery values and perform aggregation.
  • The virtual battery works and shows correct values eventually, but it lags badly in real-time.

:thinking: Possible Causes I Suspect:

  1. Feedback Loop – When the virtual battery is used as the system battery monitor, Victron components like solar chargers may use its values for decisions, and this may cause a conflict or loop.
  2. dbusmonitor Lag – The tool may be falling behind in reading all the D-Bus path updates in real-time, causing values to freeze and then catch up in bursts.

:light_bulb: What I’m Looking For:

  • Has anyone seen this kind of freezing and burst update behavior?
  • Is this known to happen when using virtual battery setups?
  • Are there better alternatives to dbusmonitor for listening to D-Bus values and doing real-time aggregation?
  • Any general advice or tools I could explore to make this smoother?

This is a bit complex, and hard to fully explain in a single post, but any insights, examples, or leads would really help me a lot.

Thanks in advance!